Ted’s post on utilization raises an interesting point: why don’t more storage admins know what they have? To me there’s really only one answer: the available tools suck. Yeah, you heard me: they suck. They’re difficult to use properly, are not (or can not be) deployed widely enough within an organization to be useful, don’t report on competitors’ products fully, and sometimes even the same tool from the same vendor reports the same metric differently between products. Case in point: one reporting tool I know of reports on two of the vendor’s own products, yet the metric is calculated differently for the two products. Not only that, but you need to have access to a hard-to-find document that points this out and explains the calculations. And good luck explaining the calculations or why they ARE different to anyone who hasn’t spent the last 5-10 years making a specialty of the topic. It’s no wonder admins don’t know their utilization numbers when even the storage vendors can’t consistently tell them what they are.
If the tools performed as expected, they would be much more widely used and there wouldn’t be a need for a group of consultants (like me) to go around developing reporting dashboards and returning a year or two down the road because the next round of people to fill the admin posts don’t understand it either. But, then, if the tools worked I’d be less valuable as a consultant, so I guess we should just keep the tools the way they are; I like being able to pay my mortgage.
